PRESAGE OF VICTORY

Then first I knew, seeing that bent grey head, How England honours all her thousand dead. Then first I knew how faith through black grief burns, Until the ruined heart glows while it yearns For one that never more returns— Glows in the spent embers of its pride For one that careless lived and fearless died. And then I knew, then first, How everywhere Hope from her prison had burst— On every hill, wide dale, soft valley's lap, In lonely cottage clutch'd between huge downs, And streets confused with streets in clanging towns— Like spring from winter's jail pouring her sap Into the idle wood of last year's trees. Then first I knew how the vast world-disease Would die away, and England upon her seas Shake every scab of sickness; toward new skies Lifting a little holier her head, With honesty the brighter in her eyes, And all that urgent horror well forgot, The dark remembered not; Only remembered then, with bosom yet hot, The blood that on how many a far field lies, The bones enriching not our English earth That brought them to such splendid birth And the last sacrifice.